Shanghai says on these pages that he will be attending a function entitled, “Love is a human right.” Well, is it? What precisely should be our rights? I know that inalienable rights are considered to be the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but there are holes to be picked even here. Life – well, I may have a right to life, even an inalienable right, but that does not stop someone from taking it if they feel so inclined, and in America at least, that does not stop the state in turn from taking the life of the person who has taken my life. And what right to life do the unborn have? Debatable at best. Liberty – what is meant by that? Simply the right not to be locked up? Well, any prisoner has forfeited that right, so it isn’t exactly inalienable either. And the right to the pursuit of happiness? I am glad that it is merely the pursuit of happiness that we are considering, so that if such happiness cannot be found, no breach of human rights will have occurred.

If you consult wikepedia, it states that “Human rights refers to the “basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled.”[1] Examples of rights and freedoms which are often thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life andliberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law; and social, cultural and economic rights, including the right to participate in culture, the right to food, the right to work, and the right to education.”

Some rights we would all agree on, such as the right to equality before the law. Let me stress the word equality. I should like to think that the responsibility of the lawmakers is always to ensure such equality, so that, for example, the right of the law-abiding citizen is accorded at least equal weight with the right of the criminal. It does not seem to me, nor to many others, that such is always the case. Then, there is the right to participate in culture. What on earth does this mean? Is the Royal Opera House subverting my human rights by charging £150 for a seat to see “The Magic Flute”, because I cannot afford such a sum? Or is this, in fact, not my culture at all because Mozart was an Austrian? Does it mean the right to follow the mores of my ancestors? How, then, do we deal with the fact that for one person, their “culture” demands that their daughters shall be married off in accordance with family wishes, while for another culture, such a thing is unthinkable? I will not even mention such considerations as conflicting religious observance, or “cultural practices”, some of which are outlawed in this country, but alas widely practised elsewhere.

Then there is the right to food. Is there a concomitant responsibility to work in order to obtain it? The figure 1 above refers to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights – so how does the United Nations propose that the right to food is to be universally applied? What about times of food shortage? How then is the right of all to be resolved when it is clear that some will have to go short? How, indeed, has this “right” been applied in times of famine in Africa, particularly when the food shortages in question have been directly brought about by political intervention, or civil war?

And what of the right to work. Might I suggest that for right, this should read responsibility? And as for right to education, what sort of education is suggested? Is the brainwashing of Soviet Russia equal to, say, the freedom of choice that those who can afford it have in this country? What of countries where the impoverished choose to educate their sons rather than their daughters? Is the United Nations addressing this fact, or is it all more empty rhetoric?

For those remotely interested, the rights that we in Britain apparently enjoy are

the right to life

freedom from torture and degraded treatment

freedom from slavery and forced labour

the right to liberty

the right to a fair trial

the right not to be punished for something that wasn’t a crime when you did it

the right to respect for private and family life

freedom of thought, conscience and religion

freedom of expression

freedom of assembly and association

the right to marry or form a civil partnership and start a family

the right not to be discriminated against in respect of these rights and freedoms

the right to own property

the right to an education

the right to participate in free elections .

So in fact, those who seek to censure anything written on these pages are in breach of our human rights to freedom of expression, as enshrined in the Human Rights act of 1998, and lest there should be any doubt, these can be read in Arabic, Cantonese, English, French, Gujarati, Polish, Punjabi, Somali, Tamil, Urdu and Welsh.

I dare say other Europeans may be able to find it written in their own language somewhere under the heading of the European Convention on Human Rights. But for those who don’t speak such languages, the message is clear: they may be rights for us, but they don’t apply universally, no matter what we or the United Nations might like to think. And as for love – we may all seek it, but it’s not, thus far, enshrined as a human right in any legislation I can find.

I wrote yesterday of the price of art, and Christopop said in a comment, “I’m waiting for an Andrew Motion Poet Laureate’s latest poem to be flogged at Sotheby’s for a bob or two.” The question is, though, what are you paying for when you by a poem at an auction house? Usually, it’s the fact that it’s written in the author’s own fair hand, preferably with fountain pen, and with amendments and changes clearly visible.

How many poets these days, though, compose with pen on paper? I remember when first computers became commonplace, and my father, who had spent his life working with them, derided the fact that most people used them as glorified typewriters. Back then, I was rather in awe of those who could compose thus: for me, to write was to seize the pen and somehow the words flowed down your arm and onto the paper, so that the process of writing was itself integral to the task. Over the years, however, I have, like everyone else, been seduced by the ease of composition on a computer: the fact that paragraphs can be shifted around at the click of a mouse; an infelicitous phrase removed; a redundant adjective excised; repetitions rephrased; and of course the undo button (or control Z if I’m on vista, because I still haven’t quite got to grips with its toolbar) there to reinstate deleted words and sentences.

Anyone who reads poetry is familiar with the facsimile reproductions of a poem in the making: of one word crossed out in favour of another; of phrases selected and abandoned, which add to our understanding of what it was the poet was trying to achieve. How will future cataloguers of our classics fare, when we all reach so thoughtlessly for our keyboards? Will Seamus Heaney’s computer be pored over by experts at American universities in order to unravel the creative process? Will whole papers be written over an order he placed at Sainsbury’s, and what it might tell us about his state of mind, as we will be able to determine that on the same day, he also wrote one of the poems that ended up in “District and Circle”? Or does he, in fact, still write in longhand?

If he does, then it may well be that his poems will end up being “flogged at Sotheby’s” for some price affordable only by public institutions or the very well-heeled private collector. But if he doesn’t, would it make any difference if instead of composing, he copied out the word-processed final version? We would still have the breath of the poet on the paper; his own handwriting – and yet, somehow, it would be but a pale shadow of the same had he written it from scratch. I cannot exactly explain, but I am sure that those who write poetry here, and enjoy reading it, will know precisely what I mean.

Today, there is the report in the Sunday Times that a picture has been discovered, one that has languished in a drawer for the past ten years, that is now thought to be a work by Leonardo da Vinci. The little portrait that is not even framed, was bought by a Swiss collector who purchased it on a whim, because he thought it was “pretty”.

Surely that is the best and only reason for buying a piece of art – because you like it. I am rather disappointed, though, that its purchaser did not like it sufficiently to bother having it framed and put on display, although I realise that eleven thousand pounds is but small change to some people. What I would say, though, and I have said this before, is in what exactly does the worth of a piece of art lie? This picture is precisely the same artwork, whether it is in fact a genuine Leonardo, or whether it was knocked up a couple of months ago by some imposter who is now doing time as a guest of Her Majesty.

If a picture is worth millions of pounds, then what are you paying for? The odious Damian Hirst is, apparently, worth over a hundred million pounds for his noxious offerings – including the ultimate in chav chic, the diamond-encrusted skull which could be replicated by any primary school child given the time and the diamonds. I venture to suggest, however, that it would take someone with very great skill indeed to reproduce the work of Leonardo da Vinci.

For a long time, it seems that this work was thought to be German school, early nineteenth century. What if it were? The fine brush-strokes, the delicate shading on the cheeks, the fact that eyelashes both above and below the eye are delineated, would be precisely the same no matter who the artist.

The owner of this work wishes to remain anonymous, at least in part because he cannot afford to insure this potential da Vinci, which he now has securely locked up in a safe. This is the ultimate irony: that something intended to be looked at is now worth so much that it must be kept under lock and key. I suppose there is not that much difference between a drawer and a safe – except that you might open the drawer from time to time to have a look at it.

It seems that the final effect of its revaluation is that the owner has now changed his mind about giving it to his daughter as a wedding present. Had he done so, perhaps its worth would never have become known – she, as dutiful daughters do, would no doubt have had it framed, and hung it somewhere that pleased her – perhaps a bedroom or dining room. The picture itself is charming – but the fact that it is now valued in millions, and regarded as a valuable asset rather than something of artistic merit, leaves me wondering once more: what is it that gives a piece of art its value? Clearly, it is not what it is, because its value would remain unchanged. It seems strange that people are prepared to pay for association: Leonardo’s hand wafted across this canvas, therefore it is worth infinitely more than if someone we are hard pressed to name wrought exactly the same work that demonstrated identical lightness of touch and skill of execution.

Perhaps it is our celebrity-obsessed age that is at fault – there are many out there who have, in truth, done nothing other than appear on television, by virtue of which they have met and mingled with others, breathed the same air, exchanged pleasantries – and this suddenly makes them more sought after people; pictures of their babies are worth ridiculous amounts to celebrity magazines, and their opinions are listened to with respect by those who might be thought to know better. So, in fact it must be with art: it is the name that is of value, rather than the work attached to it. And yet this work is not even signed – so its true provenance will remain for ever in doubt. I hope Leonardo painted it – but I don’t think that its value should lie solely in the fact of whether or not he did.

There is today an article in the Telegraph about Islamic extremists, that should give all of us pause for thought. It seems that the Centre for Social Cohesion commissioned You gov to do a survey in twelve universities, including Imperial College and King’s College, London, to ascertain the views of the Muslim students there. The most worrying of their findings was that a third of students believe that it is justifiable to kill someone in the name of religion; a third believe in the imposition of a world wide Islamic caliphate and forty percent believe that sharia law should be implemented for Muslims in Britain.

The thing I find most alarming is that these are, supposedly, educated young people who hold these views: the very sort of young men and women who will become the high flyers of the next generation, holding positions of responsibility and authority in our society. Most of them have lived all their lives in the West, and far from enjoying the freedoms and liberalism that we offer, they wish to repudiate all that we hold dear, and return us to a sort of dark ages in which women once more know their place; where Islamic law prevails, and where the death penalty is widely applied.

The Centre for Social Cohesion describes itself as a”non-partisan think-tank that studies issues related to community cohesion in Britain…it was founded in 2007 by Civitas to promote new thinking that can help bring Britain’s ethnic and religious communities closer together while strengthening British traditions of openness, tolerance and democracy.” Its most recent report is on Islamic extremism on the web. Entitled “Virtual Caliphate“, it “shows how Islamic extremists in the United Kingdom have established dedicated websites in order to circumvent British anti-terrorism measures introduced after July 2005.”

It seems that we have living in our midst people who are openly advocating Jihad, and whose extremism, if what they say is to be believed, extends to wishing to wipe out the cancer of Western society and all that it stands for, most particularly the extermination of democracy, which they regard as man-made laws that should have no legitimacy.

While those of us who grew up in the sixties might deplore the lack of Shakespeare in the curriculum, the attitude of mothers on these forums was rather different: ”With the introduction in the last few years of Citizenship into the Curriculum, we are allowing our children to be taught that they must give allegiance to the Queen, and have hatred towards our great scholars and Mujaahideen. In English, as part of GCSE, they must study Shakespeare, whose books are full of homosexuality, fornication and adultery, each of which are great sins in Islam.”

Hazel Blears’ answer to all this is to set up citizenship classes in mosque schools. She says, “the initiative was designed to show youngsters there was no conflict between their religion and being British.” It seems to me that she does not understand at all. If I hold long established views that, say, women should at all times be modestly dressed and that there is the devil in every single grape, and I find myself living in a society where young girls go around the streets both half dressed and clearly drunk, then I might indeed feel that this was a society of which I wanted no part, and that the much vaunted choices offered by a Western lifestyle were in fact no more than the blandishments of the devil that lead to the sort of fractured families and dissolute youth of which the newspapers report despairingly every day.

There is, fortunately, a huge difference between saying that you consider it justifiable to kill someone in the name of religion, and actually doing so – but if only one or two of those young people who feel so fervently that Western society with its attendant ills needs attacking from within actually put such sentiments into practice, then they will further the suspicion that exists between different religious and cultural groups in our society, which will then give them further justification for feeling aggrieved.

The Centre for Social Cohesion feels that the government has not gone nearly far enough in either policing or trying to stamp out the worst excesses of extremist belief online, and the conclusion it reaches is that “Failure to take action against these websites and the individuals who run them put the British public at risk of further terrorist attacks.” We should none of us forget, least of all the government, which exists for nothing if not protection of the realm, that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

The ex told me something that has given me pause for thought. All my children have Facebook profiles, which is, it seems, something that all of their age-group go in for. I suppose, having seen the sort of bickering that goes on here, where we are at least nominally adults, I should not have been surprised, but I was more taken aback than I cared to let on by the fact that apparently someone from “another school” wrote a message to my own dear number four daughter to the effect that she was the ugliest person they had ever seen.

Of course, you are reading this, and you are wondering what exactly my daughter looks like. She is oval of face and slim and has the bloom of youth that characterises a seventeen year old maiden, such as she is. She wears glasses, and is also afflicted (like ugly Betty) with a set of braces – but although you might pass her in the street without noticing, ugly she most certainly is not.

As her mother, I am distraught. I have been insulted in my life, even when young, and know the hurt one can feel. I also know that anything I can say will make no difference – I tell my daughters that they are pretty, and they say, “Well, you have to say that: you’re our mother.” Actually, I don’t: I have four daughters, and they are all attractive in different ways. Number one daughter is feisty and churby and a babe; number two is willowy and clever and a worrier; number three is a cat who walks by herself, but disguises her good looks in which she does not believe, and number four, her twin sister, who has been so vilified on a public forum, is sweet and dear and pretty and unassuming and has not even mentioned to me that this has taken place.

It is a mother’s place to feel guilty. She has a heart murmur, which troubles her not at all, but which, when I am in a dark place, I know somehow subliminally that I am guilty of: I bore her so it must be my fault. I was, and continue to be, a bad mother. But she is a good looking girl, and for someone to tell her, out of sheer spite, such a nasty and wounding thing, leaves me wondering about the whole nature of interactions across the internet. I would like to punch the bumptious idiot who wrote such a thing on the nose – but it would do no good, because I cannot take away the fact that such a thing was said in the first place.

Like all who post here, I am pleased when others say nice things about what I write, and ignore the few who are deliberately provocative – but I am old enough to be able to withstand such slings and arrows from MyT’s worst. If you are still at school, however, and you set up a site as do all your friends, you do not expect such denigration at the hands of one who does not even know you. What I am now supposed to do as her parent, I am not quite sure. Possibly nothing – but the adage that words will never hurt was ever untrue.

Much has been written of the dourness of our prime minister, Mr Brown, and of his decision to take his summer holiday within these shores rather than adding to his carbon footprint by going abroad. An article in today’s Times, however, proves beyond reasonable doubt that, as with most things concerning this government and the individuals that comprise it, spin is to the fore rather than factual analysis.

It may well be that it will be cheaper and greener for our PM to spend a couple of weeks with his trousers rolled up and the knotted hanky on his head at the seaside, helping his sons John and Fraser to build sandcastles. But unlike the rest of us, Brown has his own holiday home come weekend retreat in the form of Chequers, some forty miles outside London and served by a not inconsiderable and loyal staff. In this, the son of the manse is hardly like the majority of those he represents, who may find that taking any sort of a holiday is beyond their resources in the current economic climate.

Consider, too, the report in yesterday’s Telegraph, that “Second home owners could be forced to live in their country properties year-round or rent them out permanently to tenants under radical proposals outlined in a countryside review commissioned by Gordon Brown.” I can hardly think that the Prime Minister intends that such injunctions should apply to him – or indeed to any of the other MPs who are able to own two homes at our expense. But in spite of reports that he honestly truly genuinely cannot understand why people would actually want to be really rich, Mr Brown has discovered, like others before him, that it can be jolly nice having somewhere to take off to at the weekend; that the great and the good – or at least, those who have some claim to celebrity in our celebrity-obsessed society – are more than happy to accept an invitation to such congenial surroundings, and that a country retreat has much to be said for it.

In other words, all ministers are seduced by the trappings of office, and in this respect, our supposedly austere Prime Minister is no different from anyone else. When you are tightening your belt, and cutting back on life’s little luxuries, which for many, particularly those on a pension, will mean choosing between eating and heating, cast a thought for our Prime Minister, whose example to the nation, most particularly those on the left who voted for him, is to run a second home at a cost of £1,738 pounds a day. It would, of course, be churlish of me to point out that while Mr Brown is spending his time wining and dining various cronies (including such august political minds as Mr and Mrs Beckham) he is not attending to his own constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. As The Times writes, “Chequers epitomises English country living.” That’s English, Mr Brown, which you are not. It took someone of Margaret Thatcher’s disposition to be horrified by the extravagance of running Chequers – as a result of which she turned off the heating in the swimming pool. Mr Brown, for all his advertised prudence, has not seen fit to follow her example.

As one who works in a school, I am told all the time by errant teenagers that their actions are not their fault: they were “told” to do it by a friend. I have no truck with this defence, and ask them sternly whether they would follow their friend’s advice were they to tell them to put their hand in a fire, or stand on their head in the classroom. This usually provokes mirth, but the point is made: every one of us is responsible for our own actions. We may feel under pressure from another, but unless there is a huge disparity in age and status, most of us are quite able to stand up for ourselves, particularly where wrongdoing, especially lawbreaking, is concerned.

Thus I am somewhat disconcerted to read that a timid husband has been spared prison because “he only stole £205,000 to fund his domineering wife’s spending sprees.” Just how domineering does a wife have to be in order to persuade a husband to that kind of theft? It seems that the wife, who is now divorced, is saying that it was none of her doing, that her husband was in fact “manipulative and deceitful” and that he should have received at least two years in prison.

In that, I disagree with her. Here is a man who apparently set up loans in the names of family members in order to subsidise his wife’s clothes-buying habit. Why on earth he did not tell her he could not afford such expenditure, I do not know – but I do know that there are some men who feel that they should be able to underwrite any purchases their wife makes, no matter how unreasonable, and that to state openly that the wife in question is living beyond their means brings into question their status as a provider. Nevertheless, here is a man of such meekness that even the judge in the case ends up feeling a little sorry for him: he has lost his house, his pension, his wife, and his job. He has ruined everything for himself in trying to keep his wife happy, and has to boot made himself almost unemployable – a bank employee who has stolen from the bank that employs him is not likely to find it easy to find alternative work. I agree with the judge that prison is not an appropriate punishment, but not for the reason he gave, that Mr Walsh has already been punished enough. No matter how domineering his wife, no matter how plaintive her pleas that she needed the clothes on which apparently she spent a goodly amount of the money, it was he who forged the applications and obtained the money by deception – and I regret to say that it is he who is now responsible for making amends.

He has been given a term of 300 hours of community service – but I should like to know what the Bank would think is a suitable punishment. I cannot see that prison would serve any purpose, but I’m afraid that I do think reparation must be made. Even if Mr Walsh is now out of work, there is the small detail of the money to be paid back, and if I were the judge, I would have imposed a fine on top of that, because this case must have cost the bank a considerable amount of both inconvenience and embarrassment – you do not expect a trusted employee, a man who was a senior loans adviser, so to abuse his position of trust as to end up owing the very bank on which he depends for his livelihood a sum in excess of two hundred thousand pounds.

Mr Walsh may be more to be pitied than blamed, but nevertheless, he committed the crime, and should take the responsibility for having done so. He was not so cowed by his solicitor that when advised to say nothing, he could not take it on himself to go back afterwards and confess to what he had done. How much better it would have been had he felt able to withstand the blandishments of his wife, which apparently led to the situation in the first place. Justice has to be seen to be done, and while most of us might feel that prison is not the place for this man, who is patently not a danger to the public, I do not think that 300 hours of community service is sending the right message to those younger and more opportunistic, who see a chink in the law that they might hope to exploit in due course. I think it is right that Mr Walsh is not to be imprisoned, but I fear that a dangerously lenient precedent may have been set, not least the fact that a judge is prepared to allow someone who has the gumption to steal such a large sum of money to plead “timidity” as a defence.

I read today that the “widow” of John Darwin has been found guilty of colluding to help him to disappear, and benefit to the tune of £250,000. There is another article, that explains how it was that he managed both to remain hidden, and at the same time live as a husband, sharing both house and bed of his supposedly grieving widow. So successful was the deception that even her sons were taken in.

What I want to know is: will the people who signed the photographs for his false passport now be prosecuted, or will this aspect of his deceit be swept quietly under the carpet? It is reported that “When he needed a passport, Darwin used a ruse copied from the novel Day of the Jackal, traipsing around local cemeteries until he found the grave of a child called John Jones, who was born in the same year as him but died aged one month, then applied for a copy of the boy’s birth certificate, which he used to get a passport.” Is anything to be done to prevent this kind of duplicity? I had a sister, who died when I was three. Obviously, I know her name, where she was born, when she died, and details of her parents, who are, of course, my own. I have no doubt that I could with the utmost ease apply for and obtain a passport in her name – if I look hard enough through my parents’ effects, I have no doubt I could find even the original birth certificate. The thing is, though, that the photographs I would have to send with my passport application would have to be signed by someone to say that I was indeed the person I purported to be on the passport application, and furthermore, that they had known me for some time. Is there to be any investigation of the persons who so cheerfully gave John Darwin an alias as John Jones? Is this system sufficient safeguard against the cunning and long-term planner who sets up an entire bogus existence in a different name, and then asks someone to provide him with corroboration of his identity, which in all innocence, they give?

Is the whole worldwide web in fact an encouragement to all of us to be less than open about who we really are? Christina Osborne has today encouraged us to read the Washington Post – but in order to access all parts of this online, you have to sign up with e-mail address, nationality, age, occupation and other such intrusive questions. Likewise, the Times will not let me post any comment from an address as vague as “East Anglia”. I don’t think it likes the name squarepeg, either. So what should I do? Obviously, invent myself a new identity. I don’t want to be inundated with spam from “carefully selected” companies, nor do I wish to have to watch what I say by way of comment on an educational article lest it should be seen and taken amiss by the Guardian readers at school. So, you set yourself up as someone you are not, for whatever reason – and discover that you can become anything you like online. Is it any wonder that the young particularly, who have grown up with this sort of duplicity, are both hesitant to take anything at face value, and are also far more willing to, how shall I put it, experiment with the boundaries of the truth, whether on a job application, or anything else?After all, John Darwin managed very nicely for quite a long time as a disappeared person, and had he not been so careless as to permit a photograph to be published of him on the web quite clearly alive and well and in the company of his wife in Panama, he could be enjoying both his freedom and his ill-gotten gains even now.

I am led to believe that despite the exhortations from our discredited leader, Gordon, on his way to the foodfest that was the G8 summit, that we should all be a little more careful of how much food we throw away, in fact, the government could not care less how much food we squander, or whether the third world is in dire need.

I say this because of an article in today’s Sunday Times, about EU food policies. It has at last dawned on the bureaucrats in Brussels that to outlaw the selling of bunches of grapes that weigh more than a kilo, or bananas that are insufficiently bent, or as they would put it, of which “the thickness of a transverse section of the fruit between the lateral faces and the middle, perpendicular to the longitudinal axis . . . must be at a minimum of 27mm” could, in fact, be exacerbating the very food crisis that they are trying to prevent.

Our government will, of course, protest that it is trying to implement the relaxing of such rules, and that in doing so, it is flying in the face of those from France, Spain, Italy and other countries which claim that “the standards “play an important role in market operations while protecting consumers”.” In that case, Gordon, how do you justify the fact that such rules exist in the first place, and that our food inspectors, who are merely the latest gestapo-type employees of the Great State Experiment that is New Labour are permitted so far to abandon common sense that “Last month a market trader in Bristol was prevented by inspectors from selling a batch of kiwi fruits because they were 1mm smaller than the rules allowed. Tim Down lost £1,000 in sales and was not allowed to give away the 5,000 fruit because they breached the rules. “

Can you imagine such punctiliousness being allowed in the markets of Aix and Cavaillon? Do you think the good people of Carpentras would allow such Euro-lunacy to stand in the way of commerce? Yet again, this is where the whole Euro-ideal falls down: the French think we are bonkers for implementing EU rules “too literally”, whereas we, as a once law-abiding nation, cannot understand why laws would be imposed that were not meant to be enacted as written.

Of course, you might know that the great European ideal that is the EU has compromised on this, in order to appease Sarko and the vested interests of other mainland Europeans. While deploring the fact that good food has to be thrown away, it now seems that regulations will be maintained on ten items, “including tomatoes, apples, pears, strawberries, lettuce and kiwi fruit.” So the Bristol trader will still be unable to sell his illegal kiwi fruit – and it seems that no-one will come to his aid.

There are two things I would observe here. The first is: are those who govern us in Europe so far removed from normal life, and in particular the kitchen, that they do not realise that there are different uses for different sorts of vegetables? If I am making tomato soup, I really do not care what shape the tomatoes are: it is supremely irrelevant as they will all be mashed up in any case. Ditto any sort of tomato sauce, or spag bog. If, on the other hand, I wish to invite people round for dinner and serve a tomato salad, then appearance might be a little more important. I have not, however, so far taken such leave of my senses that I am unable to pick out tomatoes of an even size from a box of unevenly sized fruit.

The second is this: just what sort of a country am I now living in? I read in the papers that when a teenager was asked to pick up a piece of litter by two policemen, an ugly mob appeared, and one of the boys in blue ended up in hospital. Where were all the right-minded shoppers of Bristol, siding with the hapless trader against the might of trading standards? Are we really so cowed by these officers of the state that a little common sense cannot prevail, and the good people of Bristol be seen eating the illegal kiwi-fruit in the street? My number two daughter is at Bristol university. There are many students in the town, and not all of them come from well-to-do families. Young people are, by nature, rebellious, and an entreaty to them to take away the illegal fruit would have been something that would have appealed both to their sense of fair play and cocking a snook at authority.

I asked the number two daughter what would have happened. She said they would have fallen on the guilty fruit, and then, once the trading standards officer had disappeared, would have slipped the market trader something for allowing them to take his fruit away. She also asked whether henceforth, we must take a geometry set with us to the many pick-your-owns which are a feature of the landscape around these parts.

The NHS has been under fire recently, and government intentions to pay bonuses to NHS surgeons according to the number of lives they save will only add to its tarnished image. The proposal is that doctors should be rewarded according to how well patients recover; whether or not they have to be readmitted to hospital after surgery; whether they suffer any infections, and their degree of post-operative mobility. Surgeons have already expressed fears that, if implemented, this scheme will positively discourage doctors from taking on higher risk patients such as the elderly, and patients’ groups have said in no uncertain terms that this would be rewarding doctors for doing no more than fulfilling their basic duty of care towards their patients.

I am not a doctor, but I can foresee all manner of problems arising with these proposals. Suppose I go into hospital, and have a relatively straightforward procedure, and then contract an infection. Faced with the fact that my post-operative infection will spoil their figures, it might be that a nurse will decide to discharge me, and hope that whatever it is I am suffering will be able to be sorted out by my local GP. Of course, there would be the risk that I might end up so unwell as to require readmission, but it might be worth taking the chance. Then there is re-admission. Suppose I come into hospital, say, to have my appendix taken out. All goes well, and I am discharged. A week later, I have a heart attack, and am readmitted. Will this now count “against” my surgeon, who will have done as well as he possibly could?

Another consideration is mobility. If I go in for a gall-bladder operation, my mobility afterwards is likely to be far greater than if, say, I go in for an operation on my knee. Who is counting, and what will they count? What sort of trust will be engendered between patient and surgeon, when the patient fears that if the surgeon opens him up and discovers something terrible, he will merely close him up again and send him on his way with a tick in every box, rather than attempting life-saving surgery that might have a fair chance of going wrong? Then, there are the elderly and infirm, whose prognosis is fairly bleak at the outset. Who will take them on, if their bonus payment depends on sending them home not only hale and hearty, but also mobile? Who will pioneer the life-enhancing surgeries that, initially, might have seemed doomed to failure? Who, under such a system, would contemplate being the first to attempt a heart transplant, if such a thing were not now commonplace, because in the early days, the mortality rate was very high.

Medicine is not an exact science, and two seemingly similar people can have very different experiences and outcomes as a result of what seems to be exactly the same operation in the same circumstances. I want to be able to trust that my doctors will do their level best for me, and I have every sympathy with those surgeons who regard the proposed payment of bonuses as insulting. Likewise, if I have reached the point where established practice can offer nothing, I would be very pleased for a doctor to have a go at something hitherto untried to see if it would work. I would not want to think that he would be prevented from doing so because there was, perhaps, less than a ten per cent chance of a successful outcome.

What does the government hope to achieve? I suppose they would say that they want to avoid another case like that in the Bristol hospital where a number of babies with heart complaints died unnecessarily as a result of the surgeons’ lack of skill. But if this were the case, why was something not done at the time, and more to the point, why are there not safeguards in place anyway to alert those in a position to know about such things of unduly high mortality rates in any given hospital? And if, as I suspect, there already are such safeguards, then why on earth should these new measures be needed? In the nineteenth century, a system of payment by results was imposed in education, the argument being “if it is not cheap, it will be efficient, and if not efficient, cheap.” It failed because education is not a production line, and no more is a hospital. Do we really want our life to be dependent on whether or not our surgeon thinks it worth his while to jeopardise his bonus over what would seem to be a hopeless case with poor prognosis, but when to do so is the best chance of survival we might have?